danaleeling

The college has six campuses with each campus in its own subaccount in the LMS. Attempts to build a dashboard that would output current score data by subaccount ran into the difficulty that the Grade Report CSV export does not provide information on the source subaccount for courses.  The only column with data from which the subaccount information is a section column. The section code suffixes indicate the campus on which the course is taught, and campuses are subaccounts. Thus the goal is to assign subaccounts (campuses) to courses. Here the campuses are effectively a data analysis factor.  A first attempt was to go after the low hanging fruit of setting up a control to display online or residential courses. All Online courses are in their own subaccount. Online courses have a section designation of /On where n is a single digit integer. At present there are no courses with more than nine sections in a subaccount. The CONTAINS_TEXT function looks for the /O in the section nam...

After a dip in the week twelve due to culture day and founding day holidays, and a stronger drop during week fourteen spring break, engagement on the Instructure Canvas platform as measured by page views recovered in week fifteen and sixteen. Week sixteen is the last full week of classes for the term with final examinations in week seventeen. The strong performance in week sixteen is likely to be a result of term end papers and projects coming due. Week sixteen was slightly unusual in that page views were nearly uniform in distribution from Monday to Friday.  Weekdays usually show more inter-day variation than was seen in week sixteen. This leaves open the suggestion that students worked throughout the week to complete end of term assignments. Total page views in week sixteen were at their highest level since week eight - midterm.  The inter-day variation shows slightly more engagement, on average, for Mondays and Thursdays, with a drop seen on Friday. Saturday is an off day -...

As the Nuventive team has noted , Nuventive Improve does not retrieve data from the Instructure Canvas learning management system directly. While this was deeply disappointing to me personally as this means double data entry will have to done by faculty to get data into TracDat, my knowledge of Canvas and spreadsheets provided me with a path to reduce the amount of manual counting on my fingers work my courses would involve. Note that this process works as shown below if a faculty member is using course learning outcomes from the institutional bank of course learning outcomes in Canvas as outlined in a video on how to import course learning outcomes for use in rubrics and question banks. Start from the Gradebook and use the drop down menu to switch to Learning Mastery. The values seen in the columns are the outcomes results, on a five point scale calculating using a decaying average. In a rubric outcome achievement is deemed to be optimal, sufficient, suboptimal, or no evidence th...

With the division down to a single working printer and a broad mandate to go paperless, I looked at my one remaining primary use of paper: a clipboard that drag around outside in the rain for role call, conversion tables to use in the field, and field notes.  I informally polled the division with an email asking what technology they would need to go paperless. I was thinking of both software and hardware to replace whatever portions of their curriculum were still paperbound. Only one faculty member responded to the email, a faculty member who for over two years has requested but not received a Wacom pen digitizer tablet for use in conjunction with upper level mathematics courses. I took the non-responses of the rest of the division as entrenched opposition to attempting to go paperless.  I looked at my clipboard and then outside my window at the tropical rain falling. I had tried using my mobile phone in the field, but the screen was too small to be functional and my device is...

The last physical science laboratory of the term seeks to bring home the meaninglessness of the manner in which mathematics in taught in schools at present.  I start off my outlining the "math stack" from counting through arithmetic, algebra, and on up through calculus and beyond. I note that there are other fields of mathematics that do not make it into the stack, and yet they are no more useless to the average liberal arts major than knowing how to factor a quadratic equation. Because factoring quadratics is not a useful life skill. There are far fewer people on the planet getting paid to factor quadratic equations as a living than there are people who are paid to play video games for a living (check out the Asian competitive video game playing scene).  Then I lay out the patterns seen on the board and ask the students to predict the next letter, colored circle, arrow, or number in the sequence. Today all of the students were successful in answering my questions. I even ran...

SC/SS 115, like culture, slips away at term end with a whimper, not a bang. The course fades into the end of the term. After the April fifth invasive species walk the seventh focused on the intersection of climate change , carbon sequestration, and the role of trees in that carbon sequestration. Trees are not a simple one size fits all magic solution to the problem of carbon build up in the atmosphere.  Spring break then intervened in the calendar, ending the term in the minds of some of the students. On the back side of the late in term spring break attendance dropped. On April 19 I shared a few plant legends and stories from Kosrae and Pohnpei . On the 21st the students were to share a plant story or legend from their own culture. Of 15 students only six attended class and only three had a story to share. Which is the reality of a generation increasingly raised on and babysat by technology.  While some of the children in this Lukop, Madolehnihmw sand pile have an English ...